What are your thoughts on BitCoin?

The more I read about Mt. Gox (did you know it's name is an acronym for "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange," which was it's original function??) the more I am utterly amazed that anyone thought it was a good idea.

I never cared about bitcoins until this happened, and now that I am reading about it I am totally fascinated. In a rubbernecking a car-accident sort of way.
 
Samson said:
I thought the point was that they were highly divisible, so you could split them up such that there were more "little bits" than we would every need.
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It is divisible down to a smallest unit called a "satoshi," which apparently equals 1/100,000,000 bitcoins.

The bitcoin architecture includes a hard limit on the number of bitcoins which can ever be mined. This is around 21 million, a little more than three times as many as currently exist. The mining gets harder as the limit is approached though, so it will cease to make sense to mine them before it becomes impossible. The fact that people do loose hard drives and such would also prevent the supply in circulation ever reaching that point.


The maximum number of indivisible units is thus somewhat less than 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshi, which is apparently about an order of magnitude greater than the number of US cents currently in circulation.

It is not a particularly restrictive limit, although if it were adopted as the dominant currency worldwide and population continues to grow then it could start to be.



Personally I have less interest in using bitcoin as a currency, and more in the other utilities of the blockchain.
 
Cutlass said:
I think that this evidence that it's not as safe as it was supposed to be should be the final nail in the coffin. At least for anyone really thinking about it.
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While I agree with the "coffin" part of what you said, I am not sure about the "final nail." Did I just hear about another nail?
 
Harv said:
While I agree with the "coffin" part of what you said, I am not sure about the "final nail." Did I just hear about another nail?
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That was the beginning of the dirt being shoveled back into the grave. :scan:



illram said:
The more I read about Mt. Gox (did you know it's name is an acronym for "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange," which was it's original function??) the more I am utterly amazed that anyone thought it was a good idea.

I never cared about bitcoins until this happened, and now that I am reading about it I am totally fascinated. In a rubbernecking a car-accident sort of way.
Click to expand...


People looked at the security built into the system, or what was assumed to have been built into the system, and didn't give it a second thought. People looked at the risk management policies of Wall St banks and didn't give it a second thought.

People don't learn their lessons very well.
 
Hah. Kriegerrands. I love that show. :rotfl:
 
guys they should rename them to "crowcoins," and, uh, they're something that you eat now, so, um, bitcoin people are eating crow
 
illram said:
The more I read about Mt. Gox (did you know it's name is an acronym for "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange," which was it's original function??) the more I am utterly amazed that anyone thought it was a good idea.

I never cared about bitcoins until this happened, and now that I am reading about it I am totally fascinated. In a rubbernecking a car-accident sort of way.
Click to expand...

So... since bitcoin is the wild wild west is it fair to say that even if the robber admitted taking the bitcoin it may not be possible to prosecute? Maybe some vigilante hacker justice but. ..
 
Zelig said:
Well hackers have been jailed for stealing WoW gold, so I suspect the same thing could be managed for bitcoins.
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In what country?
 
Whomp said:
In what country?
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China, but that mostly seems to be because selling stolen WoW accounts at $3 a pop isn't really profitable in NA/Europe.

Netherlands:
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-court-rules-virtual-theft-real

In a precedent-setting trial, a court in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden has ruled that stealing virtual items is theft and sentenced two teenage boys to community service.
Click to expand...

I suspect treating virtual goods as equivalent to real ones in terms of theft will be unlikely to happen in most places, but I don't see why it wouldn't be treated like any other hacking case.
 
The Netherlands, where you can buy pizza with bitcoin and can get convicted for Runescape misbehaviour.
 
Whomp said:
So... since bitcoin is the wild wild west is it fair to say that even if the robber admitted taking the bitcoin it may not be possible to prosecute? Maybe some vigilante hacker justice but. ..
Click to expand...

Well most penal codes are pretty broad and you can basically get charged for taking anything you can put a fair market value on. It shouldn't be too much of a leap to put a value on a bitcoin even if a court did not consider it real currency. Also unauthorized computer access is itself one of the new so called "cybercrimes" that the Feds like making examples of nowadays.

The bigger problem is proving who stole it, and who even owned it in the first place. From what I have read about how bitcoins work and how this hack went down, that is basically going to be impossible. I think the most likely criminal indictments that come down, if any do, are going to be against Mt. Gox rather than anyone else.
 
I thought one of the biggest myths about bitcoins is that they are anonymous? From what I've read, every time one gets used, it leaves a stamp saying exactly where it came from and where it went. Maybe it's as trivial as setting up a TOR or whatever to mask your location though...IDK
 
hobbsyoyo said:
I thought one of the biggest myths about bitcoins is that they are anonymous? From what I've read, every time one gets used, it leaves a stamp saying exactly where it came from and where it went. Maybe it's as trivial as setting up a TOR or whatever to mask your location though...IDK
Click to expand...

Well from what I understand from the WIRED article, basically this heist involves changing some numbers around to make it look like the transaction never happened, so that instead the transaction happened with the thief rather than the real owner. Since from what I understand the way "bitcoins" are recorded is more the record of a transaction rather than some sort of virtual number of dollars sitting on a hard drive.

Also, apparently setting up a proper accounting method to prevent this type of heist was trivial, and Mt. Gox just never got around to doing it. The main dude over there is this fairly interesting, out of touch guy who is either incredibly naive and criminally negligent, or, is the most cunning thief of a half billion dollars I have ever seen.
 
Libertarian Dunning-Krugers have their new buttgold, lol lol lol lol lol.

On Monday of this week, the genesis block of this new currency was hashed, so that all future transactions can be traced back to it, and 500 MazaCoins were produced and dedicated to the “Great Spirit and the prosperity and wealth of the Oglala Lakota Nation”. Now it is being traded on cryptocurrency exchanges around the world. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
Click to expand...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasperh...erican-tribe-launches-its-own-cryptocurrency/
http://www.coindesk.com/mazacoin-sovereign-altcoin-native-americans/
 
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